Month: March 2015

On March 20th, Tyler Dockery spoke to the GDA on Wake Tech’s Main Campus in the Engineering and Technology Building (ETB).

GDA Lecture: The Resume Workshop

The resume workshop began quickly, because we planned to view over 160 resumes in the short time we had.

Beginning with IIT’s 100 master candidate resumes, we glanced over the resumes of 100 individuals with design experience cover 1-2 decades in the field. We found them to be informative, but sedate, and not at all exciting. We found them to contain lots of information, but very, very little in the way of information that would tell us about the individual. Most students actually agreed we should skim through them faster, and that it would be easy to get lost in this shuffle of papers.

Next, we focused on 60 designs I pulled from my own sources. These gave an individual grasp quickly and easily, telling us about the individual even before we could focus on the writing involved. Students overwhelmingly decided what they liked about these designs quickly and easily. Not all were winners, and it was easy to see why or why not.

Students found that flashier resumes could quickly give the intent of the designer to the individual who would be hiring them. They agreed that one of these resumes would quickly and easily stand out in a stack of the other resumes.

We finished the discussion by talking about what careers the students wanted to pursue and how they might go about showing that thorough their resumes. Marsha Mills discussed the importance of what you say and how you say it, and the double importance of having a separate resume for web design work and graphic design work, and possible photographic or illustrative jobs. Students left with the clear understanding of how a resume is really a typographic problem, but also how it can affect their overall perception.

On March 19th 2015, I chose the self-paced workshop Up and Running with Behance with Adobe Education Exchange.

Adobe Education Exchange: Up and Running with Behance

Behance is an online platform built to help creatives showcase and discover other designer’s work. With deep integration into Adobe’s desktop and mobile apps, Behance enables members to quickly share their work and collaborate with team members at the click of a button.

With a focus on professional use for students, I worked this material in three major categories:

Inspire & Explore

Step 1: Explore Behance

Step 2: Learn How Behance Works

Step 3: Explore Example Projects

Explain & Apply

Step 1: Create a Behance profile

Step 2: Start Building your Network

Step 3: Build Your Portfolio

Step 4: Make the Most of Behance

Reflect & Connect

Step 1: Consider Behance as a Tool for Teaching and Learning

Step 2: Conclusion and Next Steps

Behance can be a powerful tool for personal professional development. But increasingly, I see that educators are using Behance in the classroom as a tool for teaching and learning as well as a platform for student collaboration, sharing, and feedback. Using Teams, you can set up small collaborative groups of students in your class, whether you meet virtually or face-to-face. If you want to stretch the boundaries of your classroom, you can have students share their WIPs for public feedback that they must take into account during the revision process. Some educators even use Behance appreciations as a way to foster healthy competition during design challenges.

Behance also is a great way to support college and career-readiness. Portfolios are important in college applications and job searches. Helping students establish their online presence now, teachers can ensure that they’ll have well-curated and impactful portfolios at graduation. Hosting a Behance Portfolio Review is a great way to help students improve their portfolios in time for college applications or job fairs. Taking a moment to reflect on how I might use Behance in my teaching and learning practice, I think I’ll provide some notes to my fellow teachers.

On March 5th, Tyler Dockery was invited to attend Design Blitz in the Red Hat complex in Downtown Raleigh as a representative of Wake Tech Community College.

Design Blitz Raleigh: Group Leader

Challenge: The challenge will be a step by step process of students working with me to develop their definition of a creative person, their ideas of what a ‘workplace’ is and then prototyping and creating an example of their ‘ideal creative workplace.’ Creative packets will be presented for you that walks you through the 5 step design process we are going to promote at this event. One or two lead teachers in each area that will help you with any students and/or situation you might run into. Ideally, we want to focus on fantastical thinking, out of the box thinking, the more creative the solution the better… we aren’t as focused on a perfect model or brand with this event, we want the concepts and thoughts to shine through and the focus to be on the process of what they are doing rather than the end product. Each group will have 5 students and 1 or 2 industry volunteers. You’ll document each group’s process through an app developed by Betaversity.

Aftermath: I wanted to share with all of you the Betaversity site that has the images from the Design Blitz event on it. Sorry for the delay in posting it out, we were waiting for a site update to go through first before emailing it out. When you go to the site you’ll find a list of all the teams. In order to see one of the projects you’ll have to login as a team, any team. I listed a login below that you can use. After you login you’ll have access to click on any of the teams and go through their design process. Because of the technology issues we had at the event you’ll find that some groups have more developed images and processes than others, but hopefully in future years we’ll have this better worked out. Thanks to Betaversity for setting up the site and the step-by-step design process embedded within the projects. I hope you find this site a good artifact of what happened on that rainy March day.

Again, I appreciate all the support and help from each of you (teachers and volunteers). Feel free to share the site information with whoever you think might be interested.

Adobe Education Exchange: Commentator Badge

“As a contributing member of the Adobe Education Exchange, Tyler Dockery has received visible recognition for his level of commitment and participation. Adobe is proud to feature a leaderboard function and badge recognition to members who’s mission is to serve the community of educators by maintaining a high level of activity.”

I am an ongoing contributor to Adobe’s Education Exchange. In an effort to show milestones and fulfillment as part of this community, Adobe provides rewards and achievements in the form of badges. This badge was awarded for creating a minimum of ten (10) additional comments on ongoing topics within the Adobe Social Community. It represents your willingness to contribute and collaborate as a member of the Adobe Education Exchange. I do not plan to stop at ten. 🙂

Adobe Education Exchange: Digital Creativity Badge

“As a contributing member of the Adobe Education Exchange, Tyler Dockery has received visible recognition for his level of commitment and participation. Adobe is proud to feature a leaderboard function and badge recognition to members who’s mission is to serve the community of educators by maintaining a high level of activity.”

Upon recognized completion of my course on Digital Creativity in the Classroom, I received the Digital Creativity Badge. In an effort to show milestones and fulfillment as part of this community, Adobe provides rewards and achievements in the form of badges. This badge was awarded for completing a minimum of twenty-five (25) hours of professional development in digital creativity within the Adobe Social Community.

Adobe Online Learning: Digital Creativity in the Classroom

Learning and Teaching Digital Creativity was a class produced in six distinct parts through the Adobe Education Exchange. The course was part of a series of six Adobe Generation Professional courses designed to help educators become creators, not just consumers, of digital media. Throughout the series, I looked at new tools and techniques, explored best practices for teaching and learning, and worked creativly to help drive student outcomes.

Drop in for one or engage in many, but we guarantee this series will help you and your students take your digital skills and creativity to the next level.— ADOBE

This six-week course introduced us to the basics of digital media creation in an intensive, hands-on collaborative experience. Whether we learned to create digital images, animations, videos, and even a website using the latest Adobe tools, we explored the best practices for integrating digital media into our classrooms.

All the content we produced could be used to model good practices within our own school or college. Each week of the course introduced us to a new theme as well as an industry expert from the world of digital design.

Learning Objectives

By completing in this course, we would be able to:

Create digital images using Adobe Photoshop.

Create eportfolios with Behance.

Create a digital video using Adobe Premiere Pro and Premiere Clip, as well as Adobe Voice.

Create a website using Adobe Muse.

Explore best practices for teaching and learning with digital media.

Integrate creativity and digital media into a curriculum plan for the classroom.

Part One

This first class will begin with a thorough introduction to the EdEx platform, the course content, and norms for communicating with peers and instructors. Please ensure that you have a thorough grasp on these basics before diving into the Class 1 content, which begins in the next section.

Part Two

We began with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe’s most popular app and also a good basic tool to learn as you begin playing with digital media. This ranged from the Photoshop interface and the basic tools we needed to create our first images. We also learned how to start teaching digital imaging within our prospective classrooms. Finally, we created digital imagery and reflected on the process.

Part Three

We took a crash course in graphic design and digital publishing. We created posters using Adobe InDesign, and considered how we might integrate graphic design and digital publishing into our creative classrooms.

Part Four

We explored creating short video sequences with Premiere Pro. We covered the basics of video production including planning, shooting, editing and publishing. This was kind of fun really.

Part Five

We dove into the principles of web design, and used Adobe Muse to create a responsive website. The project brought together the images, graphics, and videos we produced in the previous weeks’ classes to finalize our tour of digital design for creative education.

Part Six

During the final week, we completed our final project. We also worked with others in a collaborative fashion.

In Conclusion

This course was designed as an introduction to digital media production for classroom teachers at any grade level, although I pursued this coursework in relation to my work at the community college level.

Even if you aren’t a teacher, you can still fully participate in the adobe digital creativity course. They just ask that you put on your teacher hat and imagine how you might teach these concepts to others. If you’ve never written a lesson plan before, they suggest you review http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Lesson-Plan

After completing the course, I received a certification, and 25 hours of professional development credits certified by Adobe.com. Along the way to the completion of these courses, I found myself taking part in providing resources, conferring in discussions, and collaborating with other Adobe.com professionals, teaching professionals and digital creatives. I earned about 700pts in their social categories, moving from “Member”, to “Participant”, and finally to “Contributor” status.

On March 5th, Tyler Dockery was invited to attend Design Blitz in the Red Hat complex in Downtown Raleigh at the Design Panel as a representative of Wake Tech Community College.

Design Blitz Raleigh: Design Panel Member

As a panel member, I sat with architects and the video designer from Red Hat. The panel answered questions regarding architecture, graphic and web design, video and social requirements among other items. Students were very interested in software and packages, freelancing while in school, what kind of computers people respected or required.

Topics ranged across multiple tracks as time went on, and the feeling was similar to my first class teaching. Nervous? Yes. Energized? Absolutely! It is always interesting to know that your knowledge is more than just “satisfactory” when facing a room with 200 people in it.

After the panel discussion, I pressed business cards into the hands of several individuals and carried on individual discussions with 4-6 students. Afterwards, I was asked to return next year. I think this sounds like a great idea, and frankly I can’t wait.